Wise Nurture: The Writings

Reading: Ps 111.

Psalms
The Psalter is Israel's hymnal, training its prayer and worship.

Worship constructs relationships of adoration of the true God, contrasting with the folly of idolatry.
Psalms train worshippers in faith, hope, and love in both good and bad circumstances.

Israel's priests were entrusted with the offices of teaching and worship.

Crucially, Jesus takes on those relationships as both worshipper and worshipped one of Israel.

Wisdom Literature
Wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Sirach, Song of Songs, etc.) is Israel's coach, training its judgment.

Israel's sages embodied and passed along their wisdom.
The collection honors the structure, intensity, complexity, and unpredictability of life.
It constructs relationships of sonship (inheritance), contrasting with the follies of lust, greed, rebellion, and ignorance.
Yet Jesus is God's primordial wisdom (Prov 8 in John 1:1-18), contrasting with human 'wisdom' (1 Cor 1:18-31).

Job radically links worship and wisdom, even under absurd suffering.
Apocalyptic (e.g., Daniel) links idolatry and immorality as primary offenses, intolerable and futile.

Life and Death Consequences
All these genres rend to reduce humanity to two extreme types: the worshipful and wise, and the heedless and foolish.

The wise bring blessing and prosperity on themselves and their families/neighbors/city/nation;
the foolish bring ruin and death.
People can cross over from one to the other (and life events, and God, can cross them over).
Discipline and virtue characterize the lives of the wise.
So Israel's future depends on cultivating both traditions and persons of worship and wisdom.

In every case, Jesus fulfills the 'moral' and even the shape of the literature.

So in keeping this literature, Jesus' disciples are trained in christlikeness.